Samsung is perhaps THE leading name in the storage space, and its 990 PRO M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) is widely regarded as the best SSD on the market today.
Although Samsung keeps its 990 PRO pricing very competitive across 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, the drives don't necessarily come cheap. That's why we usually recommend waiting for a sale when shopping around for parts and hardware to build or upgrade your PC. The 990 PRO is particularly effective in gaming and workstation PCs thanks to blistering transfer speeds, but it's also a reliable choice for practically anyone who wants to work with reliable and fast storage.
The 990 PRO has fluctuated in price quite a bit over the last few months, but this is the lowest price we've seen at Amazon since March. With a 32% discount for 2TB of storage, you're looking at only about $60 more compared to the 1TB version. With a regular list price of $250, you can now get the 2TB Samsung 990 PRO for $170 at Amazon.
✅Perfect for: PC gamers, PC enthusiasts, professionals, and practically anyone who craves speedy and reliable PCIe 4.0 storage in an M.2 format.
❌Avoid it if: Your isn't compatible with PCIe 4.0 or if you are looking for a more budget-friendly SSD.
Why is Samsung's 990 PRO so good for gamers and enthusiasts?
Samsung has had a long string of storage success from its 900-series M.2 SSDs, and it essentially took all the best aspects of the 980 PRO predecessor and made them better for the 990 PRO.
In our Samsung 990 PRO review, we handed it a Windows Central Best Award and called it "a solid upgrade over the prior generation 980 Pro flagship solid-state drive, delivering improvements like support for PCIe Gen 4 and a new controller that helps boost overall speeds, help manage power consumption and efficiency, and deliver better thermal management."
We tested the 2TB SSD with CrystalDiskMark in our review to verify Samsung's claims about transfer speeds, and the results were excellent. We saw 7,465MB/s sequential read and 6,850MB/s sequential write speeds, which is fast enough to handle high-performance gaming and other applications where large file sizes are often shuttled back and forth. If you have looking at loading screens, this drive is the answer.
Getting into more technical specs, the 2TB drive uses Samsung's in-house Pascal controller, V-NAND 3-bit MLC memory, and features 2GB of low-power DDR4 SDRAM for the cache. More important to many users is reliability, and the 990 PRO boasts a 1.5 million hour Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) rating. Samsung also offers a five-year, 1,200 Terabytes Written (TBW) warranty for the 990 PRO to give you some extra peace of mind.
Samsung offers the 990 PRO with and without a heatsink, but at this time only the drive alone is discounted. You can always add your own solution if temperatures are too high in your PC, but the drive will often be fine if you aren't placing it under a heavy sustained load. That means it's also a great option for high-end gaming laptops.
As mentioned above, this isn't the lowest price we've ever seen for the 990 PRO, and prices have been fluctuating quite a bit over the past few months. This is, however, the best price since March, with a 32% discount on the list price bringing it down to $170.
